Tuesday, February 05, 2008

David Brooks' Gentle Knives

by shamanic

David Brooks, in a move that sets him apart from most commentators on the right, has a way of gently inserting a knife into subjects when the mood strikes. Most of the men and women of the right wing blather brigade use blunt objects, throw bricks, chase down their opponents with torches and pitchforks held high, and swarm with berserker abandon, tearing their prey from limb to limb.

Most of those people don't think much of David Brooks, and I suspect the feeling is quite mutual, whereas I have complicated feelings on the subject of his columns. For instance, during the 2004 race, he penned a column tying El Salvador's 1982 elections, and the later end to a leftist "insurgency" in that country, to the scheduled January 2005 election in Iraq. This was picked up and run with, with even Dick Cheney commenting about the (non-existent) parallels between Iraq's young democracy and El Salvador's civil war during a veep debate that season.

So today, when Brooks slides his knife into Hillary Clinton, I read it and think, "Yes, this aligns with much that I know about Hillary Clinton. But much that I know about Hillary Clinton comes from the right wing thug brigade's paranoid screechings of the last two decades." And that circle of thought is the larger share of why I won't be voting for Hillary Clinton today. It's why a candidate calling for a new politics, who looks like he just might be able to pull off that miracle more often than not, is so appealing.

In short: I'm really frigging tired of it all, and would like to not spend the next five years listening to ranters and reading crazy ramblings about the latest Clinton scandal, trying always to decipher whether it is or is not a scandal at all. Spare me.

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